The CIA imposed a drone strike on a port facility on the coast of Venezuela earlier this month, reports CNN. The attack is the first known US attack on a target inside Venezuela.
The strike targeted a dock that the US government thought was being used by Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, to stock and move drugs onto shipping boats. Nobody was at the facility at the time of the strike and there were no casualties.
According to two unnamed sources, US Special Operations Forces provided intelligence for the operation. But Col. Allie Weiskopf, a spokesperson for the US Special Operations Command, said that Special Operations didn’t assist with the operation.
The United States has been trying to pressure the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, to step down using an aggressive miliary campaign in which the US has struck and destroyed over 30 boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.
The administration has claimed that this is part of an anti-narcotics campaign and Trump has mandated a blockade of sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela.
When asked Trump acknowledged the attack but has refused to say whether the strikes were carried out by the military or the CIA.
“So we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area,” Trump said. “It’s the implementation area, that’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”
Officials plan to maintain their focus on bringing down suspected drug smugglers using similar tactics that the government has used on targeting and killing terrorists. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has likened drug traffickers to al Qaeda.
“These narcoterrorists are the al Qaeda of our hemisphere,” Hegseth said at the Reagan National Defense Forum earlier this month. “And we are hunting them with the same sophistication and precision that we hunted al Qaeda.”
